


The Chamber Maid

by bluebeholder



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Corvo the Black ending, Good Men Doing Terrible Things, High Chaos (Dishonored), High Chaos Corvo Attano, M/M, Mood Whiplash, The Banality of Evil
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-01-21 21:03:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12465896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: The new chamber maid is sent to clean the private rooms of Emperor Corvo the Black and his lover. She hopes to get in and out without ever having to see them, but her hopes are very quickly dashed. Now she has the rare chance to observe the two men in a private moment, and come to some conclusions about what kind of men they are.Set in adrift_me's Corvo the Black universe.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Kinktober 2017: Long Live the Emperor, Corvo the Black](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12250689) by [adrift_me](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adrift_me/pseuds/adrift_me). 



> Thanks for letting me play in your sandbox, darling. <3 
> 
> I needed to get some exploration of the Outsider and Corvo out of my head and onto the page, and this was the result. Scary men, both of them. And poor Ella wanted nothing to do with them at all! Unfortunately, fate was not in her favor. At all.

She has to hurry. She can’t be caught here when the Emperor and his lover return from their inspection of the naval yards. That would be disastrous.

Efficiently, Ella strips the sheets off the bed. She notes with some delight that there’s no blood everywhere this time, which is wonderful. The poor launderers had been driven nearly to distraction the day that Cerine had come down with a load of sheets that looked like someone had been murdered on them. Ella doesn’t have that job.

It’s her first time cleaning the Emperor’s room and she’s so nervous she could scream. It’s like being wound around a wire. Her ears are pricked for the slightest sound and she feels like she’s stepping on hot coals. This place is too personal. She shouldn’t see the reading glasses on the desk, shouldn’t have seen the hydrangeas on the table in the other room, shouldn’t be touching the sheets where the Emperor sleeps. It feels far too intimate, as if she’s peering at the man the Emperor really is instead of the godlike king he is when he sits on the throne.

But someone has to clean here, and after the last maid was arrested for treason—idiot girl—Ella’s turn came. She’s been promoted to chamber maid, and while she’d wanted this position for years, being here is no longer an honor. It might have been, when these rooms were occupied by the Empress Emily: it is now a position to be feared.

Out of both pragmatism and security, cleaning happens whenever no one is in the suite. On the one hand, no one wants the Emperor or his lover to ever have to actually see the mundane process of cleaning. On the other hand, no one wants to be that close to them. The housekeeper, Lucy Taylor, is not afraid of them; but even her position is shaky since the execution of Geoff Curnow. It’s a matter of keeping the chamber maids safe.

She finishes making the bed and replaces the sheets with clean ones, leaving the basket of old sheets in a corner near the door while she straightens the room. Ella is careful to avoid touching the desk—that is off-limits—but she has to at least move the strewn, well-worn clothes into a basket and replace the rest where they go. The Emperor will not have a valet, and neither will his lover; this is a matter of their personal safety. In practicality, it means that the task of managing their clothes falls to the chamber maids.

Ella has an armful of clothes and is bending to drop them in the basket when the door abruptly opens. The sound snaps all that tension and she shrieks, dropping everything in her arms and spinning sharply. She cracks her head on a carved beam of the wall as she goes. She’s seeing stars when she hits the ground, but has enough presence to scramble onto her knees anyway.

“—all right?” someone is asking.

Ella clutches at her head, blinking the spots away from her vision, looks up, and nearly faints. 

The Emperor’s lover is kneeling right in front of her.

This is the man who stands by the throne, the pale shadow of the black emperor, the only person in the entire empire who might change the Emperor's mind. He'd been the Outsider, once, and the uncanny manner of the Void is still there. No one wants to catch his eye, much less cross him.

And Ella is face to face with him.

“I’m sorry,” she gasps, stumbling for words. “I should have been done a long time ago, I—”

“Hush,” he commands.

Ella shuts her mouth.

She’s fairly sure she’s going to be killed on the spot.

Gently, he pulls her hand away from her head and turns her head to inspect the spot where she hit the wall. His fingertips are warm and very human on her jaw, and he’s gentle when he touches the spot she hit. “You’re going to have a bruise, but I think you’ll be fine,” he says.

Ella is shaking so hard that she can hardly see straight. “I’m sorry, sir,” she repeats when he lets go of her. “I should have been finished before you and His Majesty returned…”

“I left the inspection early,” he says. “Too much sun for my taste; it made me feel unwell. You had no way to know. No need to apologize.”

“Yes, sir,” Ella whispers.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Ella, sir,” she replies.

He smiles faintly. “And I’m sure you know who I am. I’d say it’s a pleasure, but you may be in too much pain to feel the same.”

“I’m fine, sir,” she says.

He rises gracefully to his feet and Ella stands, too. She lurches as she goes, dizziness nearly overtaking her, and she’s mortified when he catches her. “You look like I’m going to kill you on the spot,” he says, with some amusement, but the smile fades very quickly. “Did you truly expect that?”

There’s a catch here and Ella can’t think fast enough to see it. “I made a mistake,” she says, looking down. “I shouldn’t…if you don’t wish to punish me, sir, I should go…”

“You are not going anywhere until you stop trembling and looking like you’re going to faint if you take one step,” he says. “Come. Sit down.”

It’s very clear that Ella hit her head hard enough to knock herself out, and she’s now dreaming. If that’s so, she can’t do anything but follow the hand on her shoulder that guides her into the other room and sits her at the table she’d just finished cleaning. Ella is dumbstruck when he gives her a glass of mulled Gristol cider and tells her to drink.

“For once, I’m glad that Corvo refuses the stuff with alcohol,” he says, sounding distinctly fond. “I don’t think I’d feel comfortable giving you something strong at the moment.”

“Thank you,” Ella whispers into the glass.

Green eyes study her across the table as he sits down. He’s so graceful that it’s not human. Well, he isn’t human, Ella reminds herself: he’s a god in the body of a man. “Were you finished with the room?”

“I was just about to go,” she says.

“And—to clarify—you’re not nervous because you’re in the business of treason?” His voice is light but when Ella looks up, his expression is deadly serious.

Her heart skips several beats. “N-no, sir,” she whispers.

“Good,” he says.

Silence engulfs the room for several long minutes. Ella can’t figure out how she’s supposed to leave—can she simply say that she has to go, or does he need to dismiss her, or—and at the same time, she’s in a state of complete wonder that she now knows that the Emperor likes cider without alcohol in it, that his lover calls him “Corvo”, that the man who she thought was a statue can get too much sun and need to go home.

The second time the door opens it surprises both of them. Ella flinches and nearly drops the glass; the Outsider stands up swiftly. Their reactions to the man who walks through the doorway are, however, very different. While Ella tries to make herself as small as possible, the Outsider breaks into a smile and crosses the room to wind his arms around the Emperor’s shoulders.

“I thought you were going to stay the afternoon at the shipyard,” the Outsider says.

“I worried about you,” the Emperor says. Such softness Ella has never seen on his face, has never even heard of him showing. And when they kiss it might possibly be the most tender kiss she’s ever seen, deep and slow and long. It leaves Ella feeling like a voyeur, but they’re blocking the door and she wouldn’t run anyway. Besides, the story of the time that the maid walked in on the two of them on the throne is a legend among Dunwall Tower staff now. They don't care that she's watching. In point of fact, they might even like it.

The Outsider turns to Ella. “This may be the point for a formal introduction,” he says, absently wiping his chin on his sleeve. “Corvo, this is Ella, the maid I startled by coming back too early. Ella, this—”

Good sense kicks in and Ella slides straight out of the chair onto her knees. “Your Majesty,” she says to the carpet.

Footsteps cross the room. Ella has a moment when she thinks, fleetingly, of the future that she may never get to see. And then the steps stop in front of her. A moment later, the Emperor himself is crouched in front of her. She’s close enough to see the tired lines at the corners of his eyes, the white in his beard, the faint freckles from time in the sun. “And how did you come to be here?”

Ella’s head is spinning. She opens her mouth and tries to answer, and can’t remember how to shape words. She’s inches from Emperor Corvo the Black, and she is terrified.

“Nothing to say?” he asks, brows arched. “Are you afraid of me? You’re probably right to be…”

“Don’t frighten her more, Corvo,” the Outsider says from the door. “It was my fault.”

Forty years later, when the reign of the Emperor is nothing more than a bad dream, Ella will be telling her grand-nieces and grand-nephews of what happened next. The Emperor takes her hands and raises her up, helping her to stand. Ella manages to keep her feet this time, and bows when he lets go of her. “Thank you, Your Majesty,” she says shakily. “I don’t deserve this…”

“You are one of my people,” he says. “I would do much more for you. Putting you on your feet again is the least I can do.”

The words rattle Ella to the core. This—this man with kind, tired eyes and strong, gentle hands, this man who reminds her of no one more than her father back in Poolwick—this can’t be the same man who holds a reign of terror over the country. The Emperor personally and publicly beheaded a dozen rebels mere days ago. He burns the Overseers who have gone into hiding, holds strict curfews over the city, orders impossible quotas from workers and imprisons those who fall behind, ruthlessly crushes any attempt at rebellion, and all manner of other terrible things. He’s a tyrant.

And, somehow, he’s concerned about the well-being of a chamber maid.

“You may go,” he says after a moment. Ella has no idea what’s happening, why he looks suddenly and terribly wounded and sad, but she doesn’t question it. She simply bows again and murmurs another thanks and hurries for the door.

The basket of laundry, and the Outsider, are waiting for her. “Tell Lucy,” he says, “that the Emperor would prefer you to be the only chamber maid in these rooms.”

“Yes, sir,” Ella says.

The question of why must be plain on her face, because he offers a half smile. “It’s hard enough to find good and honest people,” the Outsider says quietly. “It is that much more difficult, when one is a tyrant. Nothing is ever certain, but small victories are victories all the same.”

She’s not quite sure how to parse the riddles he’s speaking, but she nods anyway. “I’ll be sure to tell her,” Ella says. She bows to the Outsider, just to be safe, and backs out of the room.

As the door closes she hears them talking, the Emperor asking the Outsider’s opinion on the construction of a new battleship to deal with naval insurgency out of northern Tyvia. They’re already discussing matters of state, and Ella is happy to leave them to it. She doesn’t know what to make of it all, what had happened there. All she knows is that her world is shaken, that the solid ground she stood on is shifting. She was afraid when she walked into that room, and she is more afraid as she walks out.

The Emperor is human, as it turns out; and so is the Outsider. They are men, like any other men, who have flowers on the table and kiss each other and do all the things that any man does. They are unexceptional in all ways, except that they are the tyrants of the Empire.

If Ella had been a traitor, the Outsider would have killed her where she stood. The Emperor would have had her family publicly executed as a warning to future rebels. And they would have kissed each other with bloody lips over the funeral pyres.

Yes, they are men.

And that makes them all the more frightening.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual? Did not expect this to continue! But a_drift is an enabler, truly, and asked if I'd write more of this...
> 
> We'll see where the story takes us.

The one thing a tyrant values above all else is order, and by the Void, that's what they have in Dunwall Tower. Lucy rules the household with an iron fist, never once wavering, even as the Emperor rules the Isles with blood and steel. The shocking thing is that Ella has grown used to it all, has come to understand and even enjoy the routine. On Morley there is chaos and revolt; here, there's never anything more shocking than there ever was under the late Empress Emily, which is to say nothing at all.

And Ella may be the luckiest woman in the entire Empire. 

In the strangest of all turns of events, she's the only one allowed to personally enter the private chambers of the Emperors. And they are both Emperors now, ruling as one in an unprecedented move that sent shockwaves through the entire Empire. Ella should be more frightened of them than ever before, and yet there's something that keeps her from such fear.

"--have to read another single word about fishing rights in Redmoor, I may stab myself," the Outsider says as the door opens. He's not speaking to Ella; still, she prudently turns and drops to her knees as the two Emperors enter the room.(edited)  
"My love, if it will save your life, I'll read every word of those pedantic reports," the Emperor says. Ella, still looking at the ground, because caution is still warranted, can only hear the slight amusement in his voice. "I think we've interrupted again."

The Outsider sounds like he's smiling. "You may rise," he says, and Ella stands up. 

"I apologize for intruding," Ella says. "I'll go..."

"We aren't exactly discussing state secrets," the Outsider says, casting a wrathful look at the papers in his hands. "The matters of the Empire are not all exciting. And fishing rights are particularly tedious."

As always, it feels somewhat voyeuristic to see the way that the Emperor looks down at the Outsider, so frighteningly tender even in this banal moment. He takes the papers and kisses the Outsider on the forehead. "Then don't think of it."

The Outsider lets them go and the Emperor drops the report carelessly on a side table. Still, the Outsider looks irritated. "Running an empire is not just military matters, even if you seem to think it is," he mutters.

Ella tries to choke down any sound of amusement, but fails. She claps a hand over her mouth, mortified, and finds the Outsider looking at her with minor mischief gleaming in his eyes. The Emperor turns to look at her, and though he's as stoic as ever he might be smiling. "Is there something amusing?"

"No," Ella says, schooling her features and taking half a step toward the door.

The Outsider looks at the Emperor, speaking to Ella as if he's an actor on a stage giving an aside. "He'd keep me for a court jester, if I weren't cursed with such a good memory."  
"Enough," the Emperor chastises; it sounds to Ella as if he'd let the Outsider talk for hours, despite his command. The word 'infatuated' doesn't begin to cover it: absurdly, the thought of the word 'worship' drifts by. "You talk too much."

"Then find some other way to occupy my mouth," the Outsider says.

Ella had no idea that she could blush all the way to the tips of her fingers.

The Emperor actually does laugh at that, putting an arm around the Outsider. "Perhaps we should avoid embarrassing the poor girl any further," he says. "We do own a bed for a reason."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," Ella manages to get out. She takes about three more steps toward the door before she's caught by the realization that, technically, she wasn't actually finished cleaning. 

"I'd say you could stay here," the Outsider says over his shoulder, "but I think you should probably not be on this floor, if you wish to keep your composure. Fishing rights are excessively frustrating. Consider yourself dismissed."

She isn't too proud to say that she flees. When Lucy descends upon her, Ella explains and finds herself the subject of great sympathy. It's nice to know that she isn't the only one somewhat terrified of the sheer shamelessness of their Emperors. 

And she's surprised, the next day, when she receives a gift the Outsider: a bone charm, like the ones he himself wears on occasion, meant apparently to help her nerves, if worn around the neck. Ella wears it and finds that she jumps less frequently at shadows and feels a little bolder when she speaks. It's a gift she's not sure she deserves, since she'd done nothing. The only reason she can find for it is that perhaps it's an apology for embarrassing her so completely...but that would be ridiculous. What need do emperors have to apologize to servants?


End file.
